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Writ on Water	By : Lomonaaeren Category: Harry Potter > Slash - Male/Male > Harry/Draco Views: 3959 -:- Recommendations : 1 -:- Currently Reading : 1
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Chapter Four—Apologies In Time

            “You look as though that went well.”

            Harry lifted his head quickly. He’d been sitting at his desk in the Socrates office, head in hands—more than a little futilely hoping that Draco would come back—but he’d had about enough of that for the moment, and this was Macgeorge. One didn’t show weakness in front of her if one was fond of a quiet, taunt-free existence.

            And when did you ever have that? The Slytherins at school, Snape, Ron and his jokes, the twins and their pranks, and now Malfoy, of all people, as your partner.

            Still, Harry managed a weak smile and picked up some of the parchments in front of him, rustling them around to look busy as Macgeorge crossed over to her desk. She was studying him all the while, cool dark eyes fastened on his face. “What went well? It’s true that my work overwhelms me sometimes, but I think we’re all that way.”

            Macgeorge gave a quiet snort as she let her hand glance off the paperweight on her desk that appeared to hold a set of mummified fingers. Harry was all but sure that she was a potential twisted, as well, and that her flaw was necromancy. “The argument that you and Malfoy were obviously having in here. No one locks the door to an office this public for any other reason.”

            Harry snorted in turn and decided that aggression might do to scare her off the scent. Malfoy—no, Draco, as far as he knew Harry might still have the right to call him that—hadn’t tried that, because he thought being direct wasn’t like a pure-blood or something. Harry didn’t have the same sort of prejudices. “What does it matter to you? Our cases aren’t yours.”

            Macgeorge took a step towards him, and some time in between a few moments ago and now, her humor had left her. “You’re wrong,” she said. “Your reputation is the reputation of our office and our Corps, or so the press treats it, given that you’re the most famous member. Fuck up and it fucks everything up for all of us, Potter. That’s why I care.”

            Harry let his cheeks fill with air, and bit the inside of the left one as it drained out again. “Fine. So you have some reason for caring. That doesn’t mean that arguments between me and Draco are going to affect the way the Corps operates, you know. Draco is far too professional to let something like that happen.” He heard the bitterness in his voice and would have given it a lot to call it back, but Macgeorge had already heard it, too.

            “Too professional to fuck you,” Macgeorge murmured. “Too ambitious to let his career commit suicide the way you are with yours.”

            Harry glared at her and cast a nonverbal curse that required almost no wand movement. The green light that zipped past Macgeorge’s ear and buried itself in the wall next to her made her smile falter, at least. Harry sat back and said nothing when she glared at him.

            “That’s the trouble with you,” she said at last, voice so slow with contempt that she sounded as if it physically hurt her. “You don’t care about anything except your own little affairs, and then you use violence as a tool to try and settle the quarrels that arise. You’re surprised that someone else would be concerned about your effect on the Corps, given that?”

            “I only want you to stop questioning,” Harry hissed at her, and let his hand, holding the wand, rise openly into the air this time. “You can ask all the questions you want of your partner, including why the Ministry keeps me on. But you don’t have the right to ask them of me.”

            Macgeorge held still, her eyes glittering like jewels. “I’m sure a lot of people would ask why Malfoy deserves you,” she said at last. “Hero of the war that you are. But from where I stand, it’s more sensible to ask why you deserve him.”

            “I know that,” Harry said, and stood up. He had planned to brood here in the office, but it was rather useless, with Macgeorge here and antagonizing him. “And I’m going to find him and apologize. Just wait.”

            She leaned back on her desk and watched him leave. Harry caught a glimpse from the corner of his eye of her finally turning away, shaking her head. Well, that was fine. She could do that if she liked. She just shouldn’t touch Harry’s desk, or Draco’s. Draco might kill her if she did.

            I’d kill her.

            Harry took a deep breath, stopped, and leaned his forehead against the wall, closing his eyes. His brain was scattered, his thoughts darting in all directions. This had never happened when he argued with Lionel. Then he could either laugh it off, the way he did with Ron, or he pondered on it, and only it, and nothing else, until he could come in in the morning to apologize. He forced himself to stand there, feeling the cool stone against his forehead and ignoring everything else, including the stares of passersby, until he felt in control of himself once more.

            Then he realized he had no idea where Draco might have gone. With a wandering step and the vague notion that he might encounter him elsewhere in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, Harry set out.

*

            “Auror Malfoy!”

            Draco raised his eyebrows and turned in a slow circle at the call from behind him. He had just delivered his report to Okazes. He dared even that wanker to find something wrong with it that fast, and to send a public reprimand.

            But no, it was a woman who looked familiar, with dark eyes and a pointed nose, though Draco couldn’t place her. She halted in front of him, bowed her head a little as though conveying a confidential appointment, and murmured, “Auror Malfoy, you have someone on my private Floo who would be glad to speak to you.”

            The droning, nasal voice enabled Draco to think of her name at last. He found his lips curving up in contempt, and tried to force them flat and smooth again. Aurelia Stonewall had once been a valuable political contact of his father’s, although those days were somewhat past. “Thank you, Madam Stonewall, but I can’t imagine who would want to call for me, and on your private Floo.” Merlin knew that he had few other friends in the Department since Kellen’s death, and without Harry, he might have none.

            No. I’ve not lost him. I’ll persuade him to see my point-of-view somehow. He values my life, I know, and he’s killed twisted himself. It’s not as though he’d want me to die in order to save one of them.

            “Pardon me, Auror Malfoy, but,” Stonewall said, and her eyes flickered around as if to take in the population of the corridor before she spoke again. That only made Draco more wary. Some of the things that Stonewall had done for his father between the wars were shady enough to make Draco want to step away if she brought them up. “These are people who share the same blood as you.”

            For a moment, Draco thought he felt a star burning in his chest. Then the star froze and burst, scattering the particles of ice throughout his veins.

            His parents had told him they would cut him off without remorse if he persisted in being an Auror. They had made no attempt to communicate with him in the seven years since. How likely was it that this would happen right now, after an argument with his partner? No, this had to be a trick. Someone, either one of his enemies or one of Harry’s, had probably heard their fight and imagined that they could attack when the pair of them were vulnerable.

            Time to show them that a Malfoy was never, ever vulnerable.

            He smiled at Stonewall, and whatever was in the smile made her back off a step, staring at him all the while. “Tell them,” Draco murmured, barely moving his lips, “these impostors or whoever they are, that I will be pleased to speak to them when the blood in my veins spills out of those veins.”

            “You don’t understand, Auror Malfoy.” Stonewall was standing out of reach, but she clasped her hands in front of her and gave him an imploring look that was either real or finer acting than Draco had thought a toady like her capable of. “These are the real—man and woman.” Her head jerked around again, apparently checking on her audience once more. “I promise. Not a trick.”

            Draco rapped his fingers on his arm for a moment, and considered her. Stonewall bit her lip and ducked her head in a manner that someone, once, must have told her looked appealing.

            Draco decided that he would go along. If it was the trick he suspected, then he was sure he could pick up on the identity of the prankster by seeing the setup. He was cleverer than they suspected, those enemies of his.

            “Very well,” he said. “I’ll accompany you.” He settled into stride beside Stonewall, who looked as though she wanted to bounce along the corridor. But she calmed her steps at the last moment, and managed to walk beside Draco the way a normal Ministry official would walk.

            Eyes pressed on them anyway. Heads turned to track their movements, and once or twice a hand reached out as if to point at them, only to be snatched back by some other hand.

            Draco walked without appearing to notice, his pride and resentment a congealed mess in his stomach. But Malfoys were masters, as well, of eating poor meals and pretending that they were the finest feasts.

            And if pride made a poor meal, he could make of it a good seasoning.

*

            “Are you Harry Potter?”

            Harry glanced up with a forced smile. He had wandered the corridors of the Department for what felt like forever in search of Draco, and hadn’t managed to find him. It was an effort not to snap at the young woman who stood in front of him, tangled dark hair spilling over her shoulders and dark eyes wide with apprehension, but he held himself back. After all, it was hardly her fault that Draco had apparently vanished from the Ministry.

            And when Harry settled back and made himself reconsider her, she looked like someone who could use an Auror. Her nails were broken with scratching at something unyielding—perhaps even a stone wall, as it looked like. Her face had red marks that might have come from blows. She swayed on her feet, and her robes were torn away around her legs. Harry was amazed that she had come as far as she had without someone trying to help her.

            “I’m him,” he said, and pushed his fringe away from his scar as additional confirmation. The woman looked at it and smiled wanly, then closed her eyes and took a deep breath that seemed to exhaust her. The swaying became worse.

Harry steered her into an empty interrogation room and seated her gently next to the table. The woman put her arms on the table and buried her head in them. Her shoulders heaved up and down as if she was crying. Harry winced a little and sat back, trying to give her space and comfort and study her at the same time.

She looked younger than he was. In her early twenties, perhaps. And she had bony wrists that made him wince, and think of the summer, and a door with locks. Someone had held her captive for a long time, Harry thought.

            “I need your help,” she whispered, without raising her head, so that Harry could only make the words out by concentrating. “No one else believes me. He had me, the one with the blue eyes, but no one else thinks he exists. I heard him mention your name, though. You might.” She looked up at last, and the wan smile returned. “At least you’re listening to me without demanding to know what I’m talking about.”

            “What’s your name?” Harry asked softly, trying not to show the way his heart wanted to jump out of his chest. If this was a lead on the blue-eyed twisted, a lead at last…

            “Nancy.” The woman leaned urgently forwards. “You believe me? You’ll listen to me?”

            “Yes,” Harry said, and Summoned ink and parchment. Even if the door of the Socrates office was closed right now, those things were small enough to slip underneath it. He waited until they swooped in and settled before him, beginning to jot notes, included Nancy’s name and appearance. “Now. How long were you his captive?”

            Nancy licked her lips, and Harry noticed the cracks in them for the first time. It looked as though she had gone a long time without water. “It’s hard to tell,” she whispered. “But at least several days, because I remember being hungry, so hungry, and it was a long time before he fed me. He did give me enough to drink that I stayed alive, but not much more than that.”

            Harry nodded, his quill flying. “And could you tell me anything about where his house was?” He had hesitated over the word, but really, there was no reason to think that the blue-eyed twisted didn’t live in a house like anyone else. And “lair” would probably sound too melodramatic.

            Though, Harry thought as he looked back at Nancy, she could use the laugh.

            “It’s hard to tell,” Nancy repeated. “I know that I saw something red outside the window when I first got Apparated there, something huge and red. I think it was a maple tree in leaf? Maybe? But no, there was red beyond that,” she added suddenly, fretful and curling her fingers into her palm as though she blamed the skin for being there. “Some kind of great dusty plain. A desert. That’s what it was, a desert.”

            Harry wrote that down, although more slowly. He couldn’t help reflecting that it would be just like the blue-eyed twisted to have cast a glamour over the surroundings outside his house, so as to fool someone who did hear about it and tried to look for it. On the other hand, it was also possible that it was just in a desert in another country, or that he had created some sort of magical defense that would make ordinary ground look red.

            “And what was the house itself like?” he asked, with a pleasant sense of victory tingling up and down his spine. This would be the kind of information that might serve them best, when they were getting ready to attack. If they knew the setup and the defenses, they wouldn’t have to spend as much time scouting.

            He could have used glamours inside, too, he did remind himself dutifully. No use counting your options before you have them.

            “There was a big room on the ground floor where he took me at first,” Nancy was whispering, eyes closed. “It was all white, and there were mirrors everywhere. He told me that he would keep me as long as he had a use for me, and the whole time he was speaking, I could see his face reflected from every direction, with those awful blue eyes. It was horrible.”

            Harry nodded and wrote that down too. “What about the dungeons where he kept you? I reckon they were dungeons?” he added a moment later, because that probably also sounded silly if it was a perfectly normal house. “Or was it an ordinary room?”

            “It was a cellar.” Nancy shivered, and Harry cast a Warning Charm on her and then Summoned the nearest cup of unattended tea. Nancy smiled her thanks without opening her eyes. “He left a light there, sometimes, or there was enough light coming in from under the door that led to the upstairs that I could see. But it wasn’t—it wasn’t right. I could see shadows moving with no light to cast them, and more than once I felt something touch me. But whenever I started to my feet, it was gone.”

            “Hmm,” Harry said. He wrote the words, but with a note by them to remind himself that they might be influenced by something as small as the feet of rats scuttling over her, or more glamorus. “And do you know why he captured you?”

            Nancy spent a few moments shuddering, her head bent. Harry waited on her. The cup of tea had arrived, but she hadn’t touched it. He pushed it towards her, and she murmured thanks and reached out with one hand that was trembling and groped as if she would touch the cup, although she didn’t actually land near it.

            “Nancy?” Harry added, when enough time had passed that he didn’t think she was going to remember to answer.

            She lifted her head and stared at him with those haunted dark eyes.

            “He said I was sick,” she whispered. “Deathly sick, with something he knew the cure for, but he wasn’t going to give me the cure. He said I was dangerous.”

            There was a small crumpling noise, like someone wadding up a sheet of parchment, and a faint starburst behind Harry’s eyes. He frowned and reached up, wondering for a moment if this was what the victims of the blue-eyed twisted felt when he possessed them, but before the pain could develop into a full-blown headache, it faded. Harry looked up and around the room, then stared.

            What the fuck was he doing in an interrogation room when he had gone in search of Draco? And why was the parchment in front of him covered with notes? About someone named Nancy, he noticed as he read, and the blue-eyed twisted. There was even a cup of tea beside him, as if he had sat there scribbling away at nonsense for a long time, although he couldn’t remember why he would have. The argument with Draco was the important thing, and they had no new lead on the blue-eyed twisted. They hadn’t even seen something that might have been evidence of his activity since the death of Leah Anderson, another twisted, after the Alexander case, when the blue-eyed one had evidently possessed her Auror guard and forced him to strangle her.

            That at least made sense, Harry thought as he reached out to crumple the parchment in front of him, because Anderson had had—or said she did—the gift of locating any twisted. Likewise, it made sense that he might want to possess Harry, who hunted them and might hunt him someday, or Draco. But possessing Harry to force him to write down a description of an imaginary house, and someone named Nancy, when so far as he knew Harry had never met anyone with that name? It didn’t make sense. No, Harry had probably been daydreaming, or suffered under the influence of a curse that someone had hit him with earlier in the day. He’d been struck like that several times before when he sparred.

            His fingers started to crinkle the parchment.

            And then stopped, and opened it again.

            Drawn up at the top of the paper—no, not drawn, seared, as though someone had burned it into the paper—was the emblem of a star with the sun rising behind it.

*

            Draco stepped into Stonewall’s office, and there—

            There they were, his mother’s and father’s faces floating in the fire.

            Draco stopped near the door and composed himself, drawing around his shoulders the mantle of cool authority that he used when questioning recalcitrant witnesses. His posture was straight, his hands clasped lightly in front of him, and no one would be able to prove by the look on his face what he had felt when he saw them, his blood and bone, flesh of his flesh.

            “Lucius,” he said. “Narcissa.” Their last letter had also said that he had lost the privilege of calling them “Mother” and “Father.” Draco was distantly curious to see how well they would respond to his dropping of everything but their names.

            For a moment, he thought they exchanged a glance, although they didn’t turn towards each other. Well, he had had that sensation many times in childhood, as well. Invisible conversations, swirling around him, as he walked through the room where they sat or ran in the gardens with him watching them or recited his lessons in magic and mathematics and wizarding history under his father’s critical eye and his mother’s guidance. He had never managed to actually catch them exchanging those glances, or speaking those words, or thinking those thoughts.

            And now was not the best time to begin trying. Draco half-bowed instead, and said quietly, “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

            “It is no pleasure for us to speak to you, after not seeing you for so long,” his mother said.

            Draco savored the chime of her voice despite the sense of her words. He had never fully recovered from losing something that had been, once, so familiar. It was like being asked to tug his heart out of his body.

            “Then it must be duty that brought you here,” he said. “What duty?”

            His father sniffed, the most delicate of sounds, certainly not one that anyone could ever call ill-bred. “You have grown ridiculously direct and indelicate since the events of seven years ago, Draco.”

            “I am what those seven years made me,” Draco said, and saw a faint ripple run up his father’s face from mouth to forehead. Good. Causing reactions in Lucius had always been the hardest task for Draco to accomplish when faced with his parents. “Working with direct and indelicate people will do wonders for one’s constitution and tolerance of nonsense, true, but it does not do very much for one’s appreciation of the finer things in life.” He paused as if to think for a moment, and then snapped his fingers. “Of course, how silly of me. You deprived me of the finer things in life when you took my account away.”

            “You know we had to,” Lucius said.

            “There was no choice,” Narcissa added. “How could we have our son become one of the Aurors who had mistreated us?”

            Draco stared at them and shook his head.

            “What are you shaking your head for?” his mother murmured, leaning forwards for a moment as if truly interested in his reaction. Time had only made her a better actress.

            “Becoming an Auror was practical for all sorts of reasons, including showing the doubters that our blood had been integrated back into the wizarding world,” Draco said quietly. “Your notion of—of retreat was not. Becoming recluses? Refusing to speak to anyone without pure blood, including Ministry officials? This is a Muggleborn’s world now, Mother. You know that. You simply don’t want to acknowledge it.”

            “We will make and hold our own enclaves,” his father began, and Draco saw a subdued, swift motion that might have been Narcissa touching him. Lucius paused a moment, nostrils flaring shut like a camel’s, and then said, “At any rate. We contacted you for a reason. We will reinstate you as our heir, and not require you to give up the Auror position.”

            Draco stared at his father. “Your efforts to secure an alternative heir failed?” he asked faintly, but he was reeling. To be allowed in the Manor again, to have his money back, to enjoy the company of his parents insofar as he had ever enjoyed it, to be able to associate with the members of his proper social circle again instead of having a nodding acquaintance with pure-bloods in the Aurors—

            “One may be direct without being indelicate,” Narcissa said, which was as good as an admission.

            “And in return,” Lucius said, his voice so soft and lulling that it prolonged Draco’s daydream for a moment, “you have only to give up Harry Potter.”

*

            SP777: Well, you may be about to see how they would act if separated, given the temptation offered to Draco at the end of this chapter.

            And yes, both are right and wrong, I think. Although I don’t know if I would say that Harry is on Hermione’s side.

            unneeded: Yes, unless one or the both of them convince the other that their objections are irrational.
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